SAN JOSE, Calif., March 10, 2004 - Cypress Semiconductor Corp. (NYSE:CY) today announced the availability of a reference design kit (RDK) for its Ayama(TM) 10000 Network Search Engines (NSEs). The Ayama 10000 RDK provides system companies with a complete suite of tools to assist in the design-in of the industry's highest-performance NSEs.

Designed to promote the rapid development of industry-leading search system solutions, the Ayama 10000 RDK provides hardware and software models for system architectural validation throughout the product development cycle. By using this design kit, hardware engineers can validate system performance prior to silicon; software engineers can develop client applications that leverage the device capabilities; and board designers can verify board design.

"In addition to delivering the highest performance NSEs on the market, Cypress continues to accelerate the development process by providing customers with complete search solutions," said Gangesh Ganesan, product marketing manager for Cypress's NSE products. "The Ayama 10000 RDK combines all of the tools needed for designing an NSE into one comprehensive package."

The Ayama 10000 RDK includes:

Verilog behavioral model to simulate system and ASIC performance;

Cycle-accurate C-model with APIs to aid in client software development;

Cypress's Network Search EnginesCypress's comprehensive NSE portfolio has been adopted by leading router, L2/3 switch, CMTS, DSLAM and storage area network manufacturers. As a result, in 2003 Cypress more than doubled its NSE market share and was recognized as the "big winner" in NSEs by a leading analyst firm.The Ayama 10000 family of NSEs maintains the Cypress lead in the commercial TCAM market by extending the density and speed of the NSE70000 family: density options of 4-Mbit, 9-Mbit and 18-Mbit with speeds up to 266 MSPS. In addition, the Ayama 10000 family addresses system's power and latency concerns with differentiated features such as Mini-Key(TM) power management and Soft Priority(TM) table management. Mini-Key power management reduces power by engaging only the portion of the NSE array that contains entries of interest, thereby reducing power consumption by as much as 70%." Soft Priority table management enables dynamic prioritization of entries for longest prefix match (LPM) in Layer 3 forwarding applications, eliminating the latency associated with routing table updates.

Building on the Ayama 10000 family, the Ayama 20000 NSE is a high-performance TCAM-based network search engine that seamlessly connects to the Network Processing Forum (NPF) approved LA-1 interface-based commercial NPUs. The Ayama 20000 NSE has several key features such as two LA-1 ports for ingress/egress database sharing, automatic address generation for associated data, support for aging, and patent-pending dynamic power management. The Ayama 20000 NSE is available in 9-Mbit and 18-Mbit densities; at 266-million searches per second (MSPS) it is the highest-performance LA-1 based NSE in the market.

In addition to TCAM-based solutions, Cypress is the only vendor to also offer an Algorithmic SRAM-based forwarding search engine. The Sahasra(TM) 50000 NSE is a family of algorithmic search engines optimized for large forwarding tables in applications such as virtual router forwarding (VRF) and virtual private network (VPNs) that need greater than one-million table entries. The Sahasra NSE family can achieve 250 MSPS, at a fraction of the power and cost of existing TCAM-based search solutions.

Cypress and the Cypress logo are registered trademarks of Cypress Semiconductor Corporation. Ayama, Sahasra, Mini-Key, Soft Priority, "Connecting From Last Mile to First Mile" and "Cypress Connects" are trademarks of Cypress. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.